How'd you get started in music?
Me (Matt) and Jimmy were both teenagers when they decided to learn to play music, both more or less teaching themselves, Paul was only four when he started to learn from his father. Me and Paul were in the same year at high school and ended up forming a band with another friend who eventually left and a few years later went on to sell four million records as a solo artist before dying in a plane crash in bad weather.
Me and Paul met Jimmy in December 1998 and as soon as we found out he was a bass player, we asked him to join the band, West Tangleyam. We played together for a couple of years (with very little success) and then went about our lives for 20 years. The first lockdown saw us getting back into making music and we reformed the band, though gave it a new name.
Who are your inspirations or influences?
Paul - Beatles, Gerry Rafferty, Nine Inch Nails, Little Richard, Ritchie Blackmore, Eric Clapton Gordon Giltrap.
Jimmy - Queen, Def Leppard, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac.
Matt - Queen, the Beatles, Wishbone Ash, Weird Al Yankovic, Simon and Garfunkel, the Eagles.
What advice would offer aspiring performers?
Whatever reason you have for wanting to get into making music, the most important thing is that it’s something you love doing. The market these days is so saturated with new bands and songs (60,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day, that’s almost one every second!) that while success isn’t impossible, it’s very unlikely. As long as you love what you’re doing though, none of that matters.
How do you set yourselves apart from other bands or singers?
I don’t think we do, and we’re not trying to either. We just play what we like and like what we play. We have songs with a hint of folk, rock and roll, blues, but mostly it’s just standard rock. If you try too hard it can have a negative effect on the music so as long as we keep playing, learning as we go and most importantly, having fun, that will find its way into our songs and hopefully make them enjoyable enough that people want to listen.
Any new gigs or albums in the future?
We’ve been working on our first album since last year but we’re still struggling to find the time to get it done. We’re recording it all in our houses and then I mix and master everything, so it’s a very slow process. We hoped it’d be out this year but at this rate it’s not looking likely.
Gig-wise, now we can meet up again we’ve started practising with the aim of eventually gigging, but we’re not sure it’ll work unless we can find a drummer. At the moment our drums come from a programmed plugin but so far we can’t make the backing track sound that great live. If anyone knows of a drummer in the Stockport or Sheffield area, send them our way. Hell, we’ll take a drummer from anywhere on the planet as long as they can get themselves over our way to play every week!
Best wishes,
Matt
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